Debates in Algeria about the place religion should occupy in society among many Algerian intellectuals, and many of those I have talked to that live in the wealthier neighbourhoods that occupy the high ground above central Algiers, frequently remind me of a the full frontal opposition between the secular and the religious that is found in debates in France (and increasingly, elsewhere in Europe). This binary is not new to Algeria, where it has evolved and takes different forms from those found in France and has, as a result, become an Algerian narrative. In its least nuanced form, the terms of this debate pit a top-down brand of secularism, imbued with modernist concepts of republicanism, rationality, and toleration of difference against the normative version of Islam that emerged in the mid-1980s and is equated by secularists with intolerance, anti-rationality, social repression and obscurantism. In Algeria, the binary nature of this debate has been intensified by a much oversimplified political split between éradicateurs and conciliateurs during the conflict of the 1990s and continues a series of binaries that exist in socially held depictions of the Algerian past (Algerian/French; Arab/Berber, internal maquis/frontier army, etc). Such binary approaches are largely unhelpful, since they reduce diversity by excluding and silencing other voices by forcing into mutually exclusive camps.

Memories of the 1970s are often invoked during such debates in Algeria, in reference to a time when “on vivait notre religion normalement”. The 1970s are depicted as a time of bars, nightclubs and charcuteries, when people were more interested in the latest Bee Gees track than religion. As such, the 1970s becomes the decade of secularism par excellence and is opposed to a perception of a wave of religious sentiment since the 1990s, that is represented by the rise of the FIS. The debate is often fought over women’s bodies, with frequent references to the miniskirts of the 1970s opposed to the jilbab of the 1990s, with some of the most virulent criticism by staunchly secular women being reserved for girls who attempt to sidestep the debate, wearing tight clothes but still covering their hair. Interestingly, the much loved hayek stands for national religious tradition as opposed to transnational forms of Islamic dress that have reached Algeria in recent decades.

1974, 20th anniversary of the Revolution – The image has been much circulated on Facebook recently, notably on the nostalgic francophone page Alger à une certaine époque. Most comments praise the miniskirts (and absence of hijab). Original published in el-Moudjahid, 1st November 1974, with the caption: “Elles ont l’âge de la révolution”.1

While such positions reflect the experience and positions of many in Algeria, there are other narratives. Viewed from Bab el-Oued, the representations and social memories invoked when talking about religious change over time are quite different. Indeed the terms of the debate are totally different, and do not take the form of an opposition between a secular past and a religious present.

Memories of the 1970s, based on both lived experiences reformulated in the light of intervening events and on perceptions inherited (and challenged) from parents by young people, broadly depict a time when religion was the preserve of older people – with numerous reports of young people being turned away from mosques because “mazal rak sghir” [you’re still too young]. This is not just because young people were not bothered with religious practice, but due to a perception that religion was a serious business worthy of a respect that only the more mature and experienced could provide. Indeed the difference between the religious practice of the older generation and the lack thereof among young people formed one of the key sites of differentiation between generations and of traditional respect for elders. Old residents of Bab el-Oued react angrily to accusations that in the 1970s all Algerians were strangers to their religion, even though they freely admit not having bothered much with religion when they were young.

Older people in Bab el-Oued remember the gradual changes in urban space related to religion over time. New religious spaces appeared as the state attempted to meet the demands of a growing and ageing population during the mid to late-1970s, as well as to combat pressure from incipient Islamist movements that had already begun to infiltrate institutions such as the Scouts. New mosques were built in central Bab el-Oued, such as Es-Sunna and En-Nasr. Where architecturally possible, some old churches were demolished to make way for new mosques, such as the Église Saint Joseph which became El-Fath Mosque, while others remained as mosques within old church buildings, such as Et-Taqwa Mosque. Loudspeakers replaced the traditional ‘unplugged’ call to prayer and the canon shots marking the end of fasting in Ramadan were abandoned. The 1970s is thus remembered as a time of sincere religious practice for those of appropriate social status with increasing state investment in religious infrastructure.

The idea of liberated miniskirt wearing women sitting on café terraces is also challenged from Bab el-Oued, where many would not have condoned such behaviour in the 1970s. Women’s access to public space is depicted as being more limited than in the present. Unlike today, the central market in Bab el-Oued was the sole preserve of men, who would generally be responsible for the shopping. While small numbers of women did work in the tobacco and textile factories on Rue Mizon and Rue Livingstone, the main employer of women in Bab el-Oued was, and still is, the public sector (schools, Maillot Hospital and the CNAS). Women would never stop in cafés, and the Salons de Thé and ice cream parlours that are major sites of female sociability on Bab el-Oued’s main commercial street did not open until the 2000s. Relations between men and women in the 1970s are seen to have been governed by a sense of horma, respectful distance sometimes equating to physical separation. Many residents describe continuity with gender interactions present before independence in the Casbah, from where many of Bab el-Oued’s residents gradually descended until the mid-1960s to occupy flats left by departed Europeans. An often quoted example is that of the man who returns home to a shared house and coughs to announce his presence on the stairs to give women from other families the chance to disappear before he enters the main patio. Horma also implied that one could not talk to women in the street beyond family members or neighbours, while tarbiyya [good manners] dictated that men should step off the pavement to give women enough space to pass. By all accounts, while some women in Bab el-Oued did dress à l’Européene or civilisé, miniskirts were few and far between and were more the preserve of women in wealthier districts. Many residents of Bab el-Oued remember shopping trips to central Algiers being like visiting another world.

Women’s religious practice seems to have been more syncretic than that of men, with women in the 1970s being equally likely to visit the mausoleum of Sidi Abderrahmane to ask for intercession or go up to light a candle at the basilica of Madam L’Afrique [Notre Dame d’Afrique]. A number of women have mentioned that since the 1990s, they have stopped doing this, after “understanding what our religion really says”, giving a sense that many feel they were ignorant of ‘true’ Islam before the appearance of reconfigurations of normative religious practice. One woman even described the early-1990s as “ki ja el-Islam” [when Islam arrived]. However, while this period changed the habits of many in Bab el-Oued, depictions of the 1990s as being purely religious are too simplistic, given that many of the district’s bars and brasseries serving alcohol closed only in 2008.

One of the most frequent references to religious practice in the 1970s was that it simply reflected sincerity and good manners, two factors seen by many to be lacking in the much more fragmented Bab el-Oued that has been inherited from the 1990s. Even those politically involved in the heyday of the religious movement point to a golden age between 1989 and 1991 in which it seemed that the terbiya and horma that had defined social relations in the post-independence Bab el-Oued of the 1970s seemed to be at last returning after the dislocations of the 1980s, recast in an even more ‘authentic’ religious guise defined by an end to syncretism and the spread of religious practice to all age groups. Now in their fifties and able to remember the 1970s, these men draw an explicit parallel between the society the FIS tried to create and that of the 1970s. This allows us to glimpse new clues that help to explain the attractiveness of the religious movements of the 1990s. Like the older generation that preceded them, young people sporting qamis and beard also contrast a 1970s seen as representing sincere religious practice, horma and terbiya with a present in which religious appearances are more important than the principles behind them. Despite the importance of appearances, a major fault line today in Bab el-Oued is not between akhina [those with a religious appearance] and non-akhina, but between Islamists accepted wholeheartedly as tawa3na [‘ours’, i.e. from the neighbourhood] and the repentis that arrived in Bab el-Oued after the amnesty of 2005, who are often seen as having blood on their hands, as well as being identified with kwava [uneducated rural migrants]. In El-Feth mosque, more long-term residents pray separately from the repentis. Many repentis run the myriad of Islamic emporiums that dot the neighbourhood, businesses which are seen by many residents as money-laundering fronts for income earned through racketeering during the 1990s.

If for some in Algiers, the 1970s appear to stand partly for a ‘natural’ Algerian religious order that is often identified with secularism and pitted against a monolithic category of Islamism, from Bab el-Oued, the 1970s is more likely to be identified with a past seen as more morally intact and the present with a loss of traditional social values. The important point here is that, the 1970s is seen as being simply ‘better’ for different groups of people and becomes a repository of authenticity that articulates a number of different moral perspectives in the present. In Bab el-Oued, representations of religious change are crisscrossed first and foremost by images of earth-shattering social fragmentation in the 1990s, of rampant materialism and consumerism in the 2000s, rural-urban migration and the results of the 2005 amnesty. Also prevalent in depictions of socio-religious change in Bab el-Oued are previous patterns of age-defined religious practice and decreasing respect for elders and traditional structures of authority in the present; an increase access of women to public space since the 1970s and perceptions of declining respect for gender boundaries in the present; and a rise in the importance of the trappings of religious identity that is not always seen as articulating ‘true’ moral principles and which is sometimes conflated with hypocrisy, particularly by the generation born during the 1990s. Representations of religious change over time in Bab el-Oued do not therefore seem to reproduce a full-frontal religious-secular debate that exists elsewhere in Algerian society.

An image published in late December last year by satirical cartoonist Ali Dilem in the daily newspaper Liberté entitled “Algerians get ready to celebrate New Year” depicted a puzzled looking Algerian standing in front of a one-page-per-day calendar that reads “1962”. Alarmed, the man desperately tears away at the calendar and a pile of pages mounts up behind him, all bearing exactly the same date: 1962. The image of an Algerian Groundhog Day seems to work on two different levels.

Firstly, and most obviously, there is a sense that one can never really get beyond independence when talking about the past in Algeria. The monumental nature of the independence struggle and the unanimist narrative on the past created by the state after 1962 totally crush any discussion of what has happened in Algeria since independence. There are several reasons for this. The first is that the generation that led Algeria to independence remains in power, though the recent deaths of figures like Abdelhamid Mehri, Ahmed Ben Bella, Chadli Bendjedid, Pierre Chaulet and just yesterday Ali Kafi, points to its rapid passing.

In contrast, the generation that grew up after independence has been used to executing the decisions taken by its elders, and has little meaningful experience of political leadership. Mirroring this dominance of the war generation within Algerian politics, academic focus on Algeria remains largely the preserve of a generation of scholars for whom the war of independence was an equally defining moment. As a result, the experience of colonialism and the war of independence that followed have often been assumed by historians to be the only valid keys to understanding present-day Algeria. Reinforcing this trend is the fact that French academics continue to dominate the study of Algeria, which has meant a focus on events and periods that have marked France, most notably the colonial period and the war.

Focus on these periods has contributed to Algeria’s history being viewed as almost pathologically violent and overly psychologised depictions of a ‘traumatised society’. Furthermore, a purely postcolonial approach to Algerian history perversely seems to continually recast Algeria as eternally tied to France. With this in mind, and without wishing to undermine the importance of what where truly cataclysmic events, it is possible to see how a continued focus on the war and the colonial period by both the Algerian state and French academia unintentionally and uncomfortably work together to close off any focus on other periods of Algerian history, particularly those following independence. After all, if the history of Algeria is that of the colonial period and the war of independence, 5 July 1962 becomes the end – rather than the beginning – of something. This goes some way to explaining the surreal atmosphere in Algiers last July, when the country was supposed to be celebrating 50 years of independence, but managed to do so without mentioning anything that had happened over the last 50 years.

As a historian working on the post-independence period on the ground in Algiers, I strongly identify with the exasperated individual in Dilem’s cartoon. I mostly end up frustrated when attending conferences on Algerian history, hoping in vain to find something that even mentions the post-independence period, or when entering a bookshop in Algiers and finding nothing but yet more analyses of the war and its heroes. The effect on the younger generation is impressive, especially those in the two final years of secondary school, when the history syllabus focuses primarily on colonialism, the war of independence and its surrounding context. When asking a group of 17 year old girls in Bab el-Oued to place events and periods in Algerian history on a timeline, Independence Day was immediately placed in the middle of the timeline. Other dates and periods followed: the French invasion, the war of independence, the Soummam Congress, the Ottoman period. After everyone had had their turn at placing something on the timeline, the space from independence to the present remained completely empty. It seems that Francis Fukuyama got his dates mixed up. In Algeria, history ended on 5 July 1962.

However, this does not always hold true. While the crushing weight of 1962 is seemingly all pervasive, it does not prevent people from making continual reference to the post-independence period when talking about the present. People I have spoken to make multiple and overlapping references to more recent pasts – notably the socialist period under Boumediene as a kind of anchoring point that is viewed – and therefore recast and reconstructed – through intervening periods; the increased liberalisation, inequality, corruption of the 1980s; the Islamisation of society and violence of the 1990s; and the stability and consumerism of the 2000s. If Algerians are making judgements about the past – and by extension, the present – based on a broader, and more recent, set of periods than the colonial period, why is this not reflected in research approaches? Beyond conventional postcolonial approaches in history, we should perhaps be asking to what extent Algerian society is at once postcolonial, postsocialist, and even postislamist.
Academic discussions aside, Dilem’s image – like most references to the past in Algeria – says something about the present from an Algerian perspective: the sense that every day is the same as the last and there seems little hope for change.

This seems to be a familiar feeling for many of the young people I know in Bab el-Oued, because of the general lack of opportunity, crushing boredom and lack of spaces in which to merely spend time. Hanging out on the square or in the street day in, day out, making a tiny coffee in a paper cup last for hours is punctuated only by the occasional weary suggestion of “Wesh? Nḍerbu dura?” (Shall we go for a wander then?)

Algerian Arabic has a word that pinpoints the feeling produced by this daily routine: leggya, a word that is almost always pronounced with a scowl and whose meaning lies somewhere between stultifying boredom, cynicism and disgust at the world around. However, aside from the biting sense of sarcastic humour that spares no one – not least Algerians themselves – the glue that seems to hold much of Algiers’ poorer neighbourhoods together are the social bonds created around the ḥouma (neighbourhood). In its most reduced sense, the ḥouma can be smaller than a city block and be so small as to not really have a specific name. Here, ḥouma represents a crucial notion of a space in which everyone really does know everyone, the borders of which begin to fray and merge into other ḥoumāt as people gradually become more unfamiliar. While many in Bab el-Oued lament the general state of urban decay and complain that relations between members of the ḥouma are not as warm and trusting in their dealings with one another as once they were during the Belle Époque of the 1970s, the close-knit relationships still seem to contain such phenomena as regular mutual visits by children to apartments in the same building, cordial relationships between neighbours based on strict codes of politeness centred on greetings and goodbyes, and frequent borrowing and general problem solving through networks based on longstanding shared personal relationships.

Nostalgia for the past is, in this sense, a less Algeria-specific and more transversal phenomenon articulating the feeling among older people of dropping standards. For some young people, the sense of being mleggi (someone experiencing leggya), mchoumer (unemployed) or underpaid and zewēli (poor) is almost worn as a defensive badge of pride, producing social relations based on a strong sense of solidarity that serve to lessen the hardships of daily life. In contrast, others are making money through the retail trade and clientelist networks. The signs of material success are all around, from the latest Air Max trainers and flat screen televisions that sell like hotcakes, to the ubiquitous yet highly desirable brand new white Seat Ibiza sporting tell-tale 00 number plates.1 The emergence of a consumer society and the perception of a widening gap between haves and have-nots clashes with a persistent and strongly-rooted tendency within Algerian society towards egalitarianism and belief in social justice.

This clash fuels the recurrent socially held narrative on Algeria’s Belle Époque during the socialist era of the 1960s and 1970s, and articulates conflicting tendencies in Algerian society that point to the fact that 1962 is far from the be-all-and-end-all of Algerian history.

Reactions of Algiers residents to images of the city during the 1970s.

Many Algiers residents talk fondly of the 1970s as a time of stability, relative wealth and warm relations between citizens. My on-going fieldwork in Algiers focuses on the ways in which the perceptions of the past narrate the present, particularly through nostalgia.2 Of particular interest has been how the post-independence period is manifested within the urban landscape of today’s city, and the ways in which present-day residents relate to the their lived urban environment through socially held memories of the past. I was therefore keen to collect images of Algiers during the 1970s, but immediately came up against a problem: there are virtually none. In contrast, the passion for images of the city during the colonial period seems to be on the rise, visible in the increasing numbers of stalls selling reprints, maps, coins and other memorabilia around the Grande Poste and Larbi Ben M’hidi street. If so many of the people I talk to in Algiers refer to the 1970s as a kind of golden age, then why is there such a lack of publically available images of the period? One answer to this question is related to the dynamics of state socialism in Algeria and was provided by a long-time vendor of memorabilia in central Algiers. The large colonial era photographic studios, such as Jomone or Jonsol, that produced many of the images of street scenes that are reprinted today, were taken over by their Algerian employees after independence. Under this new management, the studios continued to play a similar role in the production of images of the city until the late-1960s, when they were absorbed by the newly-formed Société Nationale d’Édition et de Diffusion (SNED). Henceforth, image production was state controlled and reoriented away from documenting the urban fabric and daily life toward industrial development, the agrarian revolution and the incessant political activity of Houari Boumediene. This goes some way to explaining the lack of officially-sponsored images of Algiers in the 1970s. As for private image production, cameras were neither widely available nor affordable at the time, and security forces were even more sensitive about people taking photographs in the streets than they are today, an attitude which would obviously make one think twice about what to photograph, or whether one should even bother getting a camera out at all. Some people in their fifties have even told me that photographing any public building, even from a distance, was likely to result in arrest. As a result, many of the images of Algeria in the 1970s are postcards publish by the SNED, and were intended for a mass tourist industry that never got off the ground. These postcards show the—then brand new—tourist complexes of Moretti and Zeralda, street scenes of Algiers city centre, picturesque small town squares, modern-looking hotels, bus stations and housing blocks, as well as rural and desert scenes. Since they were never sold in large numbers, the SNED sold off its large stock of postcards during the 1990s, presumably to ease the pressures of economic restructuring, and these are now sold by a handful of second hand bookshops and other retailers.

La Grande Poste. SNED Postcard, early-1970s.

“Ya hasra! Win kunna u win rana!” Many of these images have been collected from a series of blogs and social networking sites on the history of Algiers, as well as purchased in city from traders who have also provided valuable insights into the way images of the past are consumed. The fact that many seventies postcards have ended up on the Internet has created a dynamic that has encouraged people to upload their own photographs of Algiers after independence and—significantly—to discuss the images with others. As an ensemble, these images show a well-maintained city with bright white buildings and old Peugeots and Renaults trundling down spotlessly clean streets with yellow zebra crossings, men with moustaches and oversized shirt collars and women in gleaming white haiks, neatly-trimmed trees and manicured green spaces, lots of free parking spaces and almost empty, litter-free beach resorts that are the preserve of the chic, sun-kissed denizens of a cosmopolitan metropolis. The images literally seem to ooze spaciousness, order, calm and a carefree innocence. As a result, the Algiers of the 1970s portrayed in these images is almost unrecognisable to many contemporary residents of a crowded, congested city that has expanded in a rapid and uncontrolled fashion since the late-1980s. Thus, responses to the images almost always revolve around comparisons between Algiers in the 1970s and Algiers today, with the present invariably cast in a negative light. Comments focus on the lack of traffic jams and availability of parking, as well as general cleanliness and well-maintained infrastructure. Equally, the lack of crowds and relatively empty streets seem to be a major topic of interest, and frequent comparisons are drawn with today’s overcrowded city. “Ma kach el-ghachi” [there are no crowds] is an often repeated response. Discussion of the images often includes condemnation of the city’s degraded infrastructure in the present, especially the state of pavements and roads, as well as the amount of uncollected rubbish in the streets. The single most frequent reaction to the images is one of loss and regret – a feeling that is articulated by Algerian Arabic’s nostalgic phrase par excellence, “ya hasra!”, which is used exclusively to refer to something that is perceived as having been better in the past than it is in the present. As is often the case with people in capital cities, this sense of loss and regret is often extended to cover the whole country, with one middle-class woman even saying, “je me sens perdue dans cette Algérie que je reconnais plus” [I feel lost in this Algeria that I no longer recognise.]

Behind the Place des Martyrs. SNED postcard, mid- to late-1970s.

Few seem to notice that, as postcards, many of these images were intended to show an idealised image of the city and were probably photographed in relative calm of the early morning or the weekend. Some reactions to the images bemoan the state’s disregard for its responsibility to provide a decent lived environment and even disregard for the lives of its citizens. In response to a question about why the shade giving trees around the Grande Poste were cut down since the 1970s, one person retorted, “Ils ont abattu des hommes, pourquoi pas des arbres ?” [they killed people, so why not trees?]. This suggests that the 1970s are not only read through the present, but also through intervening periods, particularly the 1990s. However, even in a country where le pouvoir is routinely blamed for a whole list of wrongs, the state’s responsibility is a secondary theme in explaining past-present disjuncture. Past-present disjuncture is also read through social changes in gender relations, public morality and rural-urban migration. Indeed, the most frequently employed strategy used to explain overcrowding and the degradation of infrastructure is to point the finger at rural-urban migrants. The impression given is clearly that those derisively labelled as chbarek or kwava [mannerless, tasteless incomers] have invaded a paradise previously inhabited by ‘more refined’ urbanites that possess a certain savoir vivre. Criticism of chbarek is extremely common, including in comments by residents of working class neighbourhoods such as Bab el Oued: “fakertni f yamat el ‘ez, kanet Bab el Oued mafihach el kavi. Mnin jaw, tahou m ssma ?” [this reminds me of the days of pride, when there were no ‘outsiders’ in Bab el Oued. Where did they come from—did they fall out of the sky?], or “duka rahu uled bled-ha u jaw nass djdad fi-ha, tebeddalu koulech” [now the neighbourhood’s original inhabitants are gone and new people have come, they’ve changed everything]. Such criticism serves to identify those that can remember the heyday of the 1970s before the large scale rural-urban migration of the 1990s as ‘pure’ Algérois, as opposed to rural riff-raff. Here, nostalgia is a litmus test of authenticity and legitimacy and articulates debates about who belongs to the city and who the city belongs to. Rural migrants are also often blamed for increased incivility and crime; I have even been told that muggings in Bab el-Oued are never carried out by ‘true’ wled el houma [those born and bred in the neighbourhood]. Though some people do admit the existence of crime and even gangs in the 1970s, others add that – unlike today – in those days even criminals displayed ‘masculine honour’ [“ta‘ ennif ou rredjla”]. Another major topic of debate is the cultural authenticity of personal appearances of the time. The haik is mobilised as truly authentic attire for women in contrast to more recent forms of hijab that are frequently labelled as foreign due to their Middle Eastern origin. The 1970s is portrayed as a tolerant age of unproblematic coexistence between haiks and miniskirts. This is a widespread view among secularised Francophone Algerians, whereas those with more Islamist leanings seem more likely to see recent changes in hijab as an improvement on the past. Though women’s bodies are usually held as the billboards of either cultural authenticity or modernity, the debate also spills over onto men’s attire, particularly facial hair. Moustaches are often perceived as socialist era facial hair and are counterposed to beards that are frequently associated with post-1970s Islamism. One young man lamented that he had not lived through “l’époque où l’Algérie kanet b chlaghemha” [when Algeria wore a moustache].3

What is nostalgia for? Socially held memories of the 1970s seem clearly to be refracted through diverse experiences during the intervening periods of 1980s and 1990s, particularly increased Islamic public morality, generational splits, urban degradation and rural migration. However, what matters most about these portrayals of past-present disjuncture is perhaps not the object or period that triggers or embodies feelings of nostalgia, but the reference to an individual’s memory of past desire for a version of the future or alternative present, along with the awareness that this desire cannot be relived. As such, nostalgia has less to do with the past itself, than with the fantasies that structured the past; with people’s past emotional investments about present and future—a kind of imagined future located in the past. The 1970s is often remembered as a time of rapid improvements in living standards, pride in Algeria’s place in the world, a perception of unity and a palpable optimism for the future. Nostalgia for the seventies is then perhaps little more than mourning for once felt optimism and pride. As such, nostalgia carries politically subversive potential. Paradoxically though, nostalgic practices may serve to create continuity with the present. Indeed, the tacit social contract under Boumediène—a separation between private and public life in which people retreated from politics into private affairs and material concerns in return for security and freedom from political harassment—bears a striking resemblance to that existing under Bouteflika. Depictions by present-day politicians of continuity with the Boumediène period provide much-needed legitimacy, but also simultaneously side-line political involvement as unnecessary. However, much nostalgia for the 1970s is simply predicated on memories of youth, and may have little political content. When telling Algerians about my research, saying I am working on the 1970s causes very different reactions than saying I am working on the Boumediene era. The former statement almost invariably brings a flood of warm memories and negative evaluations of the present, while the latter incites divided reactions over the legacy of the policies of Boumediene himself (with Kabyles and Islamists often displaying the most negative reactions). Thus, rather than being subversive, seventies nostalgia can belie a wish not to engage with politics. For those experiencing disjuncture between past and present lifeworlds, nostalgia allows the integration of “personal memories into a narrative without politically endorsing or condemning an era not yet perceived to have fully resolved into history”.4 Presenting nostalgia as a sort of universal longing for youth or childhood allows political implications to be evaded. Framing nostalgia as apolitical seems to point to the fact that the authoritarian practices of the time require some justification. However, politics are of course at work in what nostalgic practices accomplish and in who does the labelling and naming of practices as nostalgic. For more confirmed Boumedienists though, politics is very much present and authoritarianism is not called into question at all. For some, despite its political authoritarianism, the Boumediene era is viewed as preferable to the democratic veneer of present-day multiparty politics because of the perceived welfare, stability and warm relations between citizens of the period. One Bab el-Oued resident in his forties pointed out that in the 1970s, people had “khobz u khedma” (bread and jobs), which he characterised as the basics of a decent life. If present-day ‘democracy’ can’t provide these basic things, he said, there is no point in it. Other informants have drawn even clearer distinctions, couching present democracy as a political game of periodic power redistribution among the elite (therefore authoritarian) and 1970s authoritarianism as providing for citizens’ basic social needs (therefore more ‘truly democratic’). This reversal goes to the heart of a debate about what democracy means to Algerians. If older Algerians are those most able to establish past-present comparisons, lamenting the passing of “un beau monde discipliné” [a fine disciplined world] and decrying the replacement of “voitures ta‘ essah” [proper cars] by Chinese imports, many younger people display a bemused surprise that Algiers could ever have been a nice place to live at all. One youth reacted to a picture of a neatly-clipped garden behind the Place des Martyrs that has since been replaced by a multi-storey car park, saying, “wallah, on dirait Alger en 2099!” [I swear this looks like Algiers in 2099!]. There is a sense of dislocation and confusion among young people that things appear to have been better in a past they never experienced, giving a feeling that time is moving in the wrong direction: “On retrograde grave” [We’re seriously going backwards]. One young man could simply could not go on seeing images of what must have seemed like a parallel universe: “Putain, je n’ai plus le moral…” [Shit, this is too depressing to go on…]. For the vast majority of Algerians I have spoken to, especially young people (80% of Algerians that were born after 1979), the everyday certainties of 1970s-Algeria seem to form a safe narrative for talking about the past, one of the few that exists between different generations in a country where ‘true’ history is routinely perceived to be held under lock and key – one of few forms of consensus about the past in an otherwise thorny and divisive history.

“It really brings tears to my eyes when I see what has become of Algiers, such a shame!”, “I envy my parents who were lucky enough to be young during the belle epoque”, “We feel nostalgia for a period we haven’t even lived through…”

The fieldwork is part of a PhD in History that uses an ethnographic approach to explore social memories of the 1970s in a particular neighbourhood of Algiers, Bab el-Oued.

The fact the majority of today’s young Algerian males are clean shaven, or sport fashionable stubble easily distinguishable from the fluffy beard of Islamists, perhaps indicates—as well as the urge to follow and reappropriate global trends—a wish to sidestep an ideological debate on public morality that has been posed in terms of diametrically opposed, mutually-reinforcing discourses on religion and secularism that mirror those found in France.